I had a VM on vSphere 5.5 that I was trying to move to a new ESXi 6.7 host via vCenter.<\/p>\n
First I exported the OVF template from vSphere 5.5.<\/p>\n
Then in vCenter, on the vSphere 6.7 host, I deployed the OVF template.<\/p>\n
Error!<\/p>\n
The \"Deploy OVF template\" operation failed for the entity with the following error message.\r\n\r\nUnable to deploy template.<\/code><\/pre>\nThe error was vague. Why was it unable to deploy the template? Is there a compatibility issue between 5.5 and 6.7?
\n<\/p>\n
I looked at the files from the 5.5 export:<\/p>\n
\n- CentOS7.mf<\/li>\n
- CentOS7.ovf<\/li>\n
- CentOS7-disk1.vmdk<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
The .mf file is apparently a manifest<\/em> and appears to contain SHA1 hashes of the .ovf and .vmdk files.<\/p>\nI created a new VM in vCenter 6.7 and exported it. The files:<\/p>\n
\n- CentOS7.mf<\/li>\n
- CentOS7-2.iso<\/li>\n
- CentOS7-1.vmdk<\/li>\n
- CentOS7-3.nvram<\/li>\n
- CentOS7.ovf<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
The .mf file appears to contain SHA256 hashes of the other 4 files.<\/p>\n
I tried importing the OVF package exported from 5.5 again, but this time instead of deploying it directly I first uploaded it as a Content Library template and then tried deploying it from there.<\/p>\n
It failed again! But it returned a different message this time:<\/p>\n
Failed to deploy OVF package.\r\n\r\nCause:\r\nThe object or item referred to could not be found.\r\nThe specified object \/CentOS7\/VirtualIDEController1:0 could not be found.<\/code><\/pre>\nI modified the VM in vSphere 5.5 and removed (disconnected) the CD-ROM drive. I exported the OVF again.<\/p>\n
I tried importing the OVF file, and voila<\/em> — it worked!<\/p>\nExporting an OVF is time-consuming through, especially if the VM has a large disk. I ran into this again recently with a 250 GB VM, and I didn’t want to wait 4+ hours on another OVF export. Is there a way to do this without re-exporting the OVF?<\/p>\n
I opened up the .ovf file in a text editor and found 2 IDE controllers:<\/p>\n
<Item>\r\n <rasd:Address>1<\/rasd:Address>\r\n <rasd:Description>IDE Controller<\/rasd:Description>\r\n <rasd:ElementName>VirtualIDEController 1<\/rasd:ElementName>\r\n <rasd:InstanceID>4<\/rasd:InstanceID>\r\n <rasd:ResourceType>5<\/rasd:ResourceType>\r\n<\/Item>\r\n<Item>\r\n <rasd:Address>0<\/rasd:Address>\r\n <rasd:Description>IDE Controller<\/rasd:Description>\r\n <rasd:ElementName>VirtualIDEController 0<\/rasd:ElementName>\r\n <rasd:InstanceID>5<\/rasd:InstanceID>\r\n <rasd:ResourceType>5<\/rasd:ResourceType>\r\n<\/Item><\/code><\/pre>\nThere was also a floppy drive, but I noticed it included an ovf:required=\"false\"<\/code> attribute:<\/p>\n<Item ovf:required=\"false\">\r\n <rasd:AddressOnParent>0<\/rasd:AddressOnParent>\r\n <rasd:AutomaticAllocation>false<\/rasd:AutomaticAllocation>\r\n <rasd:Description>Floppy Drive<\/rasd:Description>\r\n <rasd:ElementName>Floppy 1<\/rasd:ElementName>\r\n <rasd:InstanceID>10<\/rasd:InstanceID>\r\n <rasd:ResourceSubType>vmware.floppy.remotedevice<\/rasd:ResourceSubType>\r\n <rasd:ResourceType>14<\/rasd:ResourceType>\r\n<\/Item><\/code><\/pre>\nFirst I tried added the ovf:required=\"false\"<\/code> attribute to the existing IDE Controller items.<\/p>\nIn the Deploy OVF Template<\/em> dialog, between step 3 “Select a compute resource” and step 4 “Review details” there is a “Validating” step that failed with the following error message:<\/p>\nThe checksum(s) from the provided manifest file do not match the content of file(s): CentOS7.ovf.<\/code><\/pre>\nThe manifest (CentOS7.mf<\/code> in this case) is optional. I tried again, this time including just CentOS7.ovf<\/code> and CentOS7.vmdk<\/code>.<\/p>\nIt passes the validation step, but still fails! The error message is the same:
\nThe specified object \/CentOS7\/VirtualIDEController1:0 could not be found.<\/code><\/p>\nI tried deleting the XML Item elements for the IDE controllers entirely and deploying the OVF again. This time there was a different error during the validation step:<\/p>\n
Issues detected with selected template. Details: - 77:7:VALUE_ILLEGAL: Value ''4'' of Parent element does not refer to a ref of type DiskControllerReference.<\/code><\/pre>\nI looked in the .ovf file again and found one additional item that referenced the CD-ROM drive:<\/p>\n
<Item ovf:required=\"false\">\r\n <rasd:AddressOnParent>0<\/rasd:AddressOnParent>\r\n <rasd:AutomaticAllocation>false<\/rasd:AutomaticAllocation>\r\n <rasd:ElementName>CD-ROM 1<\/rasd:ElementName>\r\n <rasd:InstanceID>8<\/rasd:InstanceID>\r\n <rasd:Parent>4<\/rasd:Parent>\r\n <rasd:ResourceSubType>vmware.cdrom.iso<\/rasd:ResourceSubType>\r\n <rasd:ResourceType>15<\/rasd:ResourceType>\r\n<\/Item><\/code><\/pre>\nAfter I deleted that, the import worked!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I ran into an error when importing an OVF template from one ESXi host to another. It turned out in my case that an attached IDE device, the CD-ROM drive, caused the problem. You can detach the CD-ROM drive and re-export the OVF template to resolve this, or you can edit the XML .ovf file and remove references to the problematic IDE device manually.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[422],"tags":[427,514,512,513,428],"class_list":["post-2656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sysadmin","tag-esxi","tag-ovf","tag-vcenter","tag-vmdk","tag-vsphere"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2656"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2723,"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2656\/revisions\/2723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/osric.com\/chris\/accidental-developer\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}